Category: Uncategorized

Eli DeFariaI remember when I was 24 — I was working at my big girl job, and I recall telling my co-worker that I had hopes of working in the entertainment industry. I foolishly shared my aspirations with her, and do you want to know what she said? She said, “Aren’t you too old to…

If I had seen the poster before I watched the movie, I wouldn’t have bothered. Also, the movie was produced by WWE….

So after 94 minutes of straining to follow this movie, I managed to conclude that I could have better spent the 94 minutes doing something else…. like sleeping.

I have to admit that the movie started off with a bit of a bang. It seems a little bit interesting. It follows an American living in London with his daughter. He works as a security guard during the day and moonlights as a single father at night. However, his world is turned upside down when three individuals break into his house and try and rob him of drugs (shock horror cocaine), only for them to realize that they have got the wrong address. After they threaten to kills his daughter (after they beat him into unconsciousness with baseball bats and he wakes up), he decides to go bad ass and kill all three of the robbers.

If the movie was to end at this point, it would have been a brilliant start and end to a movie. There would have been enough mystery around who this main actor dude was, why his wife was dead, and it also showed that he was a bad ass and loved his daughter so much that he was willing to murder some dudes in self-defense.

Unfortunately, the guys who wrote this movie decided to carry on with the movie. They then made up some feeble story about him being some agent for some unnamed secret agency in ‘Murica, how his wife was killed because of the job, and how much he loved his daughter (even though he kills her grandfather at the end of the movie).

What then ensues in between the rather bland story telling, is a lot of chase scenes (It seems like they ran across most of London), semi-exciting fight scenes that had a lot of slow motion wrestling moves and more drop kicks than one would see in The Royal Rumble 2017.

I would strongly suggest that if you have nothing to watch, don’t watch this movie. Take your chances with watching paint dry. That would be more engaging than watching these guys running around and getting paid to act as though they are distressed.

The movie was so distressing that I am struggling to find many more words to describe the feeling that I went through, lying in bed and concentrating on the occurance of the actors in this movie. It didn’t even have a happy ending when it could have had one. They actually killed the only possibility of giving it a happy ending. They also ensured that there would be no room for a sequel (Thank God!) but tying up all the loose ends.. all one of them.

There are various sayings of encouragement one can use. “If you don’t shoot, you won’t score”

“If you don’t shoot, you don’t score”

“If at first, you don’t succeed…..”

“If you don’t buy a ticket to the lottery….”

I have probably been lulled into a state of comfort because of the fact that I have a job at the moment. However, it would be totally remiss of me to say that I am a happy camper at my current place of employment. So what is the plan?

Before I skirt around the plan, there are some other things that I might as well mumble loudly about. It is next to impossible to be completely happy at work. That is something that needs to be clarified. An important question that one needs to also ask themselves is why do we work. For myself, the answers are all over the place. I work to survive (feed, clothe and entertain myself). When taking into consideration Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, my reason for working is still at the second stage – safety.

Work for me feels like a way of being safe. I am not a very good at taking risks, and this is the reason why I have probably found myself in a little bit of a weird place. I have been working for the same organization for the last six years of my life. Sometimes too afraid of change, other times too comfortable to fathom what the world out there other than my current employer is like. At the same time, I make time every day to complain about one or five aspects regarding work. Of course, everyone complains about work. I used to think that my dream job was being a video game tester, but I don’t think I am cut out doing what I enjoy doing in my spare time for a living. I mean, I like my field of employment. There are many aspects that I can get to experience, there are always challenges, problems that need to be solved and daily minor victories that I am able to celebrate, even if they are celebrated all by myself.

They say that human being use a minute percentage of the capacity of our brains. Sometimes I feel it is because of the false sense of comfort that is portrayed to us through the various medias that we see and hear. We/I spend too much time being happy about the minor victories but never realizing that there is so much more that is out there for one to achieve.

2017 is the year for positivity. So this year I challenge everyone who takes the time to listen to my ramblings to take at least one step out of their comfort zone. Do something that you know you should have done a while ago. This should be the year of always forward, backward never. My middle school had a Latin saying on the coat of arms. It read “Ex fide Fiducia” – From faith arises confidence. Let’s have a little more faith in ourselves and also in each other. Let’s go and buy that lottery ticket. Let’s definitely take that shot. We all only have one life. Live it to the fullest.

“Hell is when the person you become meets the person you could have been”

Omar YassenSeriously. Let 2017 be the year you finally accept what you have done, and come to terms with the fact that you will never be able to change that. Let it be the year you come to terms with everything that you haven’t done, and everything that you haven’t accomplished, and just let it be.…

simonanicotraThank you for being in my life even if my life took me miles and miles away from you, I can still feel you next to me. Thank you for always lifting me up when I’m down even if you have to do it through video calls and weak internet connection. Thank you for being…

Last month two major reports came out on economic and political reform in Zimbabwe. The first from Chatham House, looking at economic reform and the question of re-engagement by international actors, and the second, from the Institute for Security Studies, looking at similar themes, but focusing more on the political challenges. They come to rather […]

I have done a lot of research (replace a lot of with a little) by doing interviews of engineers without informing them that I am interviewing them, and I have come to the conclusion that some engineers (especially those that work in the construction industry, as they are the one who I mainly work with) suffer from the engineer complex.

This is something an engineer(s) engineered the shit out of….

Now the engineer complex is very hard to explain so I have tried to break down some of the behaviours that us of smaller brain power can understand. You see it seems that engineers are far too clever for us mere mortals to keep up with. They have to sometimes speak a version of english known only to non engineers that they have a basic understanding of. This in turn aids them in keep us mere mortals from all sorts of demises. These include mixing dangerous chemicals that have the potential of killing everyone with in a two square meter radius, to making a concrete design that can’t hold the force exerted by the Titanic, to making proper use of Microsoft Project.

A drawing of another thing that an engineer(s) engineered the shit outta… again

All in all they tend to be pleasant people all round. In fact as much as they do not want to admit it some of them exhibit traits of humanness. I have worked with engineers who are best friends with alcohol, others who feel they need more than one woman in their lives (their wife plus one), and others who are so chill that you don’t know if the emotion known as anger has EVERY come to visit them.

I would like to warn any engineers that read this who I have worked with or work with currently that I am going to say something that you may not like… and I don’t really care. So in a sense there are spoilers…..

They like to say who is an engineer and who isn’t: It not like engineers are the only professionals on this planet. So what if Lukaku is an engineer or studied engineering. The dude is now a footballer. He gets paid to score goals. I do get the feeling that sometimes they are trying to look down on me because I was too dumb to keep up with ridiculous equations that will be solved for you using a computer.

They like to show that they know what they are talking about: Ok so this is a work place and we are all adults. So unless its mathematical, opinions are like assholes. We all have one. I don’t try and prove you wrong if you say that Chelsea would win the World Cup if they played in it. That’s your opinion. Maybe wrong for a few reasons, such as why would a club team be playing against nations, and who will play if there are some guys that play for their nations and also Chelsea. However that is a conversation for another time (replace another time with never).

“That time in college when you and some other engineer showed your lecturer he was wrong”: That’s nice. It is good to hold onto the small victories hey. It helps you to keep a focus and motivated to achieve the other things in life you want to achieve. But damn, its like that guy who wants to tell you about the number of beers he drank while hanging from a tree upside down with one hand while catching multiple boomarangs in his mouth….

Do you know what project crushing is? I can show you: Maybe it is the engineers who are kinda fresh out of uni/college. They sometimes think that it is their job to teach everyone a little bit of engineering. I think thats actually quite commendable.
There is some information that you struggle to find the relevance

We should learn some more about the built environment especially if you work in it. I sometimes wonder if some engineers think that everyone else who is working in the built environment was created out of moon dust when the project started and as such do not know a single bit of engineering? Engineering covers a lot of subjects. There is engineering in project management. It’s not the kind of engineering that some engineers consider to be engineering.

Useless information me thinks….

So to all my engineers out there (except for the chemical engineers and the electrical engineers coz I haven’t worked with any of you guys and have a very basic understand what the two do), keep engineering, stop being annoying. Your faculty wasn’t the only faculty at university/college. So what if you had the best soccer team. That was then. let’s do the here and now and see how that goes. There may not be any equations for you to solve, but I am sure I can find ways to keep your overactive brains from gathering dust and forgeting how to engineer the shit outta… shit.